janebot

Jane is a Slack bot that orchestrates long-lived coding subagents in isolated sandboxes. She has opinions and won't say "Great question!".

SOUL.md defines her personality. docs/threads.md explains the thread model. docs/security-model.md covers isolation, credentials, and what Jane can and can't do. docs/session-store.md documents SQLite session persistence.

Setup

Requires Node.js 22+.

1. Create a Slack app at api.slack.com/apps using slack-manifest.yaml
2. Generate an App-Level Token with connections:write scope
3. Install to your workspace

cp .env.example .env
# Add your tokens

pnpm install
pnpm dev

Mention @janebot in a channel or DM her.

Architecture

• Top-level Jane is a persistent Pi orchestrator session per Slack thread.
• Host orchestrator runs with no built-in file/shell tools and delegates via run_coding_subagent.
• Each Slack thread gets a sticky coding subagent session in a dedicated sandbox.
• Follow-up messages in the same Slack thread continue the same Pi session.
• Use /status in a thread to inspect subagent status, and /abort to stop a running coding job.

Config

Variable	What it does
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN	Bot token (xoxb-...)
SLACK_APP_TOKEN	App-level token (xapp-...)
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	From your Anthropic account
WORKSPACE_DIR	Where Jane works
SESSION_DB_PATH	SQLite file for persistent session mappings
PI_MODEL	LLM model (optional, defaults to claude-opus-4-6)
JANE_LOG_LEVEL	Log verbosity (debug, info, warn, error)
SANDBOX_BACKEND	docker (default) or sprites (invalid values fail startup)
SPRITES_TOKEN	Required when SANDBOX_BACKEND=sprites
ALLOWED_USER_IDS	Who can talk to her
ALLOWED_CHANNEL_IDS	Where she listens

Empty allowlists mean no restrictions.

Run locally

pnpm dev

Logs show requests and response times. Restart to pick up changes.

REPL

Use the REPL to exercise the same thread-runtime codepath as Slack (runThreadTurn + runControlCommand):

pnpm repl
pnpm repl -x "status"
pnpm repl -x "Reply with exactly: ok"

This is intended for architecture-fidelity testing, not a separate execution mode.

Deploy

fly launch --copy-config
fly secrets set SLACK_BOT_TOKEN=xoxb-... SLACK_APP_TOKEN=xapp-... ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
fly deploy

For tmux/manual runs with immutable sandbox image tags:

pnpm start:prod

This computes sbox-<hash> from Dockerfile.sandbox and scripts/bootstrap-sandbox.sh, pulls ghcr.io/buildkite/janebot-sandbox:<tag>, sets DOCKER_SANDBOX_IMAGE, and starts janebot.